


The World May Be Long For You

by doloploke



Category: Young Justice (Cartoon)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Grief, Multi, Post Season 2
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-24
Updated: 2017-03-24
Packaged: 2018-10-10 06:01:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,441
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10430709
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/doloploke/pseuds/doloploke
Summary: “Nightwing led his friends into the dark, piled secrets on top of secrets, won empty victories and pretended that was good enough. Dick Grayson lost his family, lost Jason, lost Wally.He doesn't want to be Nightwing anymore, and he doesn't want to be Dick Grayson, either. So he just...stops. He puts his selves into a little box in his mind, shuts the lid, and leaves.”or: Dick Grayson goes on a weird, sad Eurotrip. Artemis snaps him out of it.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Title (and general vibe) from the Decemberists' song "Grace Cathedral Hill."

Dick doesn't stick around much, after. It feels like an intrusion. All eyes should be on Artemis, who is hurting so badly, who has come back to her life just in time to lose so much. No one should be thinking about him.

_(wally didn't.)_

“I need a break, Kaldur. You, me, Wally, we founded this team. Without him...”

Kaldur says he understands. Dick isn't sure he can.

He's almost at the zeta tubes when a hand on his shoulder stops him. It's Black Canary, looking up at him with soft eyes.

“Nightwing,” she whispers. “If...if you ever need to talk, I'm here. We all process grief differently, but talking about it can help ease the pain.”

_The best friend I ever had died hating me. Nothing will ever change that. Nothing will ever make that feel better._

“Thanks,” Dick says, and doesn't mean it. “I think I just need to be alone for a bit.”

Dinah looks at him sadly, but lets him go.

 

 

Nightwing led his friends into the dark, piled secrets on top of secrets, won empty victories and pretended that was good enough. Dick Grayson lost his family, lost Jason, lost Wally.

He doesn't want to be Nightwing anymore, and he doesn't want to be Dick Grayson, either. So he just...stops. He puts his selves into a little box in his mind, shuts the lid, and leaves.

 

 

He packs without really thinking about it. T-shirts, boxers, toothbrush, a sheaf of false papers and fake passports. Insignificant details. His phone is practically untraceable, but he turns it off anyway.

He withdraws two thousand dollars from the bank—as much as he can fit into the hidden inner pocket of his backpack. The teller smiles at him, and somehow he smiles back. 

He zetas to Paris, and already it's almost too much. Wally had been in Paris with Artemis, just before. Had they walked down this street, with the light like this? Had they watched the late afternoon sun glint off the Seine, heard music from the riverboats drift across the water, caught the hint of fragrance from that dogwood tree? Had Wally felt happy here, truly happy, for the first time in months?

A woman jogging by stops and asks him if he's all right. In unaccented French, he tells her he has allergies.

He finds a currency exchange near Gare de l'Est, buys a train ticket to Munich in cash. He isn't sure where he's going, other than _away from here_.

 Munich is okay, because he doesn't leave the train station. He buys another ticket, on an overnight train headed east.

 He has a compartment to himself, which is nice. When his head starts to spin from hunger he makes his way to the dining car and buys a turkey sandwich and a bag of chips. A group of middle-aged men are playing cards at one of the tables and drinking scotch. One of them calls out to him in German, asks him if he wants to join. He smiles at them blankly, like he doesn't understand. The men shake their heads at him, turn back to their game.

 He eats his food quickly. It tastes like nothing. Then he turns out the light and folds up by the window. The motion of the train beneath him is familiar, andit makes him feel like a child again. He watches the countryside slide by, trees and houses darker shapes against the dark sky, until he falls asleep.

 

 

He ends up on the Black Sea coast, in a little tourist town that's mostly hotels and bars. There's space for him at a youth hostel. The girl at the front desk asks him his name. He says “Ivan Marinov”, because it's the name on one of his passports.

 A bar by the beach is hiring. “Ivan” speaks Bulgarian a bit clumsily, but his English and Russian are good enough to make up for it in a tourist town. He's very charming, too, with his sharp cheekbones and boyish smile. He gets the job.

 The days go by. The work is fine, and the regulars seem to like him. They mistake him for Russian, or Romanian, but not American, which is good. He sublets a room from an old woman whose children have moved away. He helps her with her laundry and listens to her talk about her grand-daughter, who is studying to be a pharmacist at a university in Sofia.

 At night he goes to the beach. He leaves his clothes in a pile on the sand and swims out past the breakers, staring up at the vast dome of the sky and letting the dark water hold him. He doesn't dream.

In late August, a group of five young men around his age come into the bar early in the evening. They're from the UK, abroad on a lads' holiday before university starts up again. They sit at a table near the window, chattering among themselves, talking over each other. He feels very old.

“What can I get for you?” he asks. He puts a hint of an accent into Ivan's voice.

“Oh, damn,” says one of them, the lanky one with red hair and freckles on his nose. “I wanted to try to say it in Bulgarian.”

 Ivan smiles. “You still can. _Kakvo bikhte iskali?_ ”

 The kid lights up. Ivan's stomach drops. “Oh, okay, _bikh iskal_ , uh,” the kid frowns. “How'd'you say 'whiskey'?”

 “ _Uiski._ It's pretty much the same,” Ivan answers. The kid blushes as his friend snickers at him. “And for the rest of you?”

 They drink themselves silly on whiskey and red wine, then leave to go dancing. The redhead's friend, the one who laughed, winks at Ivan as he collects their check. In a moment he sees why: on the receipt is written: _'bikh iskal get to know you better. come by at midnite, if you want.'_ Underneath is the address of a hotel and a room number.

 He gets off work at 11:45, and makes his way up the hill to the hotel. The old man at the desk avoids his eyes in an attempt at discretion as he points him to the room.

 The door opens at the first knock. It's the redhead—he pushes his hair back from his forehead and smiles nervously.

 “Uh, come in,” he says, standing aside. Ivan does. The room is small—two twin beds, a desk, a television—and smells faintly of cigarette smoke.

 “Don't worry, no one will bother us,” the redhead says when he sees Ivan's eyes linger on the second bed. “I told my mates ahead of time I'd be, uh, having someone over, so. Got the room to myself tonight.”

 “Good to know,” says Ivan, his lips quirking into a sly grin. He sits down on the bed by the window.

 The redhead takes a deep breath, then comes to join him.

 “I didn't get your name, before,” he says. “I'm Charlie.”

 “My name's Ivan. So, shall we get to know each other better?” He flashes the same smile, but broader, more plain in its intention.

 “Yeah, yeah we should.” Charlie's voice is a bit strained. He puts his hand on Ivan's thigh. “Your English is, like, really good, by the way,” he says, like it's a compliment. Ivan climbs into Charlie's lap, slings his hands loosely around his shoulders. He can feel the kid's erection through his jeans.

 “God, you're gorgeous,” Charlie exhales. “You know that, don't you? Of course you do, Christ, how could you not--”

 “You should stop talking and kiss me,” Ivan whispers, his lips an inch from Charlie's ear.

 “Fuck,” Charlie says, and does.

 They fuck twice, first fast and desperate, then slow and languid. Charlie takes him from behind both times, muttering “Christ” and “shit” and “fuck” to himself and pulling at Ivan's hair with scrabbling fingers. Ivan moans at the right times and tries very hard to not think of anything but the cock thrusting in and out of him and the sensations building inside him.

 He doesn't stay the night. On the walk back to his place, he stops and sits on a wall overlooking the water. He stares out across the sea, feeling tired and very small.

 He leaves the next month's rent on the old woman's dining room table, with a note saying thank you. He's gone before the sun comes up.

 

 

On the early bus to Sofia, he takes out his phone for the first time in weeks. There are messages waiting for him.

 “ _My friend, we can get through this together. --K”_

 “ _Everyone misses you._ _Please come home, we need you here_ _—M”_

 “ _Check in. --B”_

 “ _Benders are stupid, and they don't fix anything. I would know. Come home. --R”_

 “ _Talk to us, maybe it'll help. –BG”_

 “ _At least_ _let_ _us_ _know_ _you're alive, you dick. I miss you. --Z”_

 “ _Check in.--B”_

 “ _The team needs you. --C”_

 “ _T is scared. Please check in.--B”_

 He turns his phone off again, leans his head against the vibrating window and watches the sky turn from black to grey to blue. But he uses an ATM in Sofia so that Batman will know he's alive.

 He picks grapes in the Italian countryside for a few weeks. The other seasonal workers are mostly older men who speak to each other in Rromani. He pretends not to understand. Dick Grayson spoke Rromani with his family in private moments, and then later, with Alfred, when the old man tried to learn Dick's home language so he would have someone to speak it with when he felt unbearably alone. Dick Grayson would have tried to join in the conversations because they felt like home. He doesn't.

 One day in September the oldest of the workers calls out, asking for help with a heavy pallet, and he answers without thinking. The men welcome him, then, try to get him to sit with them at meal times. They ask him where he's from, who his family is. He tells them some version of the truth—he grew up on the road, his parents are dead, he has no other family. The old man puts a hand on his shoulder, tells him he will pray for him.

 He leaves the next day.

 

 

There's a commotion in the Milan train station while he's buying his ticket to Geneva. The ticket agent is handing him his change, and then there's a sound like an enormous generator coming to life, and someone screams.

 He moves almost without thinking. He grabs the father and daughter in line behind him and bundles them behind the ticket kiosk, then tries to get his bearings. People are tripping over each other, trying to get away from the northeast corner of the station, where the thrumming sound is coming from. He fights his way through the crowd of people, and reaches the epicenter of the commotion just in time to see a boy in yellow and red fall to the ground before Count Vertigo.

 He almost screams, almost howls out a name, but then a blue figure with wings swoops in and counters Vertigo's blast with a blast of his own, and he realizes that the boy on the ground is Bart and he is still alone. Someone—Karen, he guesses—zaps Vertigo in the eye, and he goes down, clutching his face. Interpol officers rush in, handcuffing their prisoner and hauling him off.

 Karen grows to human size and starts attempting crowd control. Jaime helps Bart up, his hand lingering on the speedster's shoulder. Bart turns, pushes his hair out of his face, and for a second Dick wonders how he ever could have mistaken him for Wally—Bart's eyes are so different, so far-off and sad where Wally's had always been lively and fierce, filled with urgency.

 Dick freezes, terrified for an instant that Bart recognizes him. He will have to explain himself, here, in the middle of all these people, with his heart beating a million times per minute and his world coming apart at edges. But then Bart's gaze slides off him, unseeing, as he turns to congratulate Jaime on a crash job.

 Dick manages to make it to the bathroom before he throws up. He stays crouched in the stall for a long time, shaking with sobs, trying not to make a sound.

 He washes his face in the sink when he's done. When he looks in the mirror, Dick Grayson is gone again. He leaves nothing in his place.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Artemis finds him in London.

 She wasn't looking for him. If she had been, she probably wouldn't have found him.She's looking for somewhere nice to sit for a few minutes, to get her head back together after a long session surveilling Lex Luthor's meeting with the British prime minister. Under-cover work still gets to her sometimes. It's too easy to let Artemis slip away under some persona, even one as simple as “girl at a bus stop looking at her phone.” But she always has to come back eventually. Reentry hurts more and more each time. So she does her best to stay herself.

 Part of staying herself is spending a few minutes after missions with her face to the watery winter sun, feeling the cold, wet grass under her fingers and thinking about nothing in particular. So she's looking for a sunny place to sit in Hyde Park, by the big fountain. She likes the sound of water on stone.

 She finds Dick instead.

 At first she mistakes him for a handsome stranger. But the angle of the chin and the curve of the cheek are too distinctive, too familiar. She can see a spidery white scar on his hip where his jacket has ridden up. She'd been there when the Joker had given him that scar. She remembers it.

Dick is stretched out under a tree, eyes closed. His hair is longer than it used to be, curling slightly at the edges. A backpack is tucked under his head like a pillow. If he's noticed her, he isn't showing it. She's heard from the others that he's been ignoring their messages. Maybe he'll talk to her. Out of affection, she hopes, but she'll take out of guilt too.

 Artemis nudges him with her foot. “Good morning, starshine.”

 Dick's eyes fly open. He looks like he's seen a ghost.

 “A—Artemis?” he splutters, sitting up. “What're you—how—I'm--”

 “I was in town for a mission,” Artemis says. She extends a hand to help him up. He stares at it like it's a foreign object. Artemis sighs. This might be difficult.

 “Everyone's pretty mad at you, y'know,” she says.

 “I know,” Dick says meekly. “I deserve it.”

 Artemis feels a little bad, for making his voice sound like that, but after all this time, she is in no mood to pull punches He _should_ feel bad. He is—had been?--her best friend, and he'd _abandoned_ her. She had come back from months of pretending to be someone else, and was trying to figure out who Artemis was again, only to have this huge other part of her ripped jaggedly away. She had needed Dick to remind her of who she was. And he had just _left._

 She kind of wants to punch him, but he's looking like he might let her, so she doesn't. She sits down next to him on the cold ground.

 “Why'd you leave?” she asks. “When you said you needed a break, we all thought you were just gonna spend a couple of weeks holed up in your apartment. Not, like, leave your entire life to go on some weird, sad Eurotrip for five months.”

 Dick laughs. It's an empty sound.

 “It's too hard to explain,” he says.

 “Try,” she says. He doesn't look at her.

 “I'm not going back to the team,” he says, after a while. “I can't. Not yet.”

 “Okay,” she says, “but I think you should come back to the States with me for a while.” She can tell from the way his lips quirk down that he's about to refuse, so she goes for the headshot. “We needed you, Dick. We _still_ need you. I think you owe me this much.”

 Dick flinches hard, like she's actually shot him. That was brutal, she knows, but it's necessary. There's something _wrong_ with Dick. Artemis can tell even from this brief interaction that he isn't even close to coping. Looking at his face is like looking at an empty room.

 “...okay,” he says, so softly that it hurts her. “Okay. I'll come.” He looks up at her. His eyes aren't as clear as she remembers them being. “Artemis, I'm--I'm so--”

 “It's okay,” she says quickly. He looks like he's an inch from crying, and Artemis realizes she doesn't actually want that. “We can talk about this more later. Right now, everything's okay.”

 Artemis stands up, brushing grass and cold dirt off her jeans. She extends her hand again, smiles this time. Dick takes it.

 “So, what've you been doing all this time?” Artemis asks as they wind their way out of the park.

 “This and that,” Dick replies. He's still having trouble looking at her. “I waited tables for a while here and there, worked on a few farms. I've been driving a pedicab here for the last few weeks.”

 Artemis snorts. “Really?”

 “Hey, it's not a bad job. Get to see the city, meet people. Besides,” he grins ruefully, “tourists tip well. Especially older, unsatisfied-in-their-marriage American tourists.”

For a moment the Dick she recognizes, playful and sly, is back. But in the next moment he's gone again, and she's left with a shell that won't meet her eyes.

 “I was ready to move on, though,” he says.

 “Bart thinks he saw you in Milan,” she says. “Did he?” She thinks she sees Dick wince.

 “Yeah,” he admits. “I thought he didn't recognize me. Kid's got a hell of a poker face.”

 “No shit,” she says. “The rest of the team's doing okay, by the way. Not great, but okay.” Dick definitely winces this time. “Some of the newer members don't really listen to Kaldur, out of loyalty to you. Cassie seems to think you're her dad.”

 That gets a chuckle, at least. “I'm only, like, five years older than her.”

 “Doesn't matter. She still thinks you're her dad.”

 They pass through the low line of hedges that marks the boundary of the park and emerge onto a busy commercial street. There are already holiday displays in all the shop windows—twinkling lights, cardboard Santas, empty boxes covered in wrapping paper and bows. Artemis doesn't like looking at them. She shrugs her coat up higher around her ears.

 “So, um, where are we going?” Dick asks as they dodge holiday shoppers.

 “San Francisco,” she replies. “It's the closest zeta tube to my sister's, and I'm babysitting today. It's also on the opposite coast from most of the people you're avoiding.”

 The zeta tube is hidden in an out-of-service maintenance elevator in an uncrowded Tube station. No one takes any notice of Dick and Artemis as they make their way down the platform and slip inside.

 “Ladies first,” Dick says. It's so familiar and so strange, all at once. Artemis thinks of the kid she used to know, the one with the quick smile and quicker feet, who promised her they'd laugh about all this someday. She remembers following him through a zeta tube that dreary night in Gotham, remembers his small, determined face telling her to fight. That kid was unbreakable.

 “Nice try, Grayson,” Artemis says, and pushes him through.

 Artemis steps into the tube after him. She feels herself dissolve, and lets herself hope that some things never change.

 

 

There are no explosions to greet her this time. There's just Dick, looking out of place beside a dumpster in a dark alley. It's before dawn on the West Coast. The air is cool and wet on Artemis's face.

 Artemis takes her time reorienting. She cracks her knuckles, pulls her hair back from her face and into a low ponytail, like she used to do when she was a teenager. Zeta tubes make her hair frizz.

 Dick is fidgeting. He's never been good at standing still, and it only gets worse when he's nervous. He runs his hand through his hair three times, til it's flowing up from his forehead. It makes him look like a cartoon prince.

 “I should, uh, I mean, if you want, I can go--” He's babbling. Artemis takes pity on him.

 “I have a few hours to kill,” she says firmly. “The garage where I stashed my bike isn't even open yet. I'm gonna go sit in this park that I like, watch the sun come up. You should come with me.”

 “Okay,” Dick says. Okay. This might be okay.

 

 

The walk from the zeta tube to Grand View Park is long and steep. They pass little pastel houses, hair salons, cafes, and drug stores, all dark and quiet. Fog swirls around their feet. The air is cool and a little sweet—it smells like rain, and gardenias. Artemis will always think of herself as an East Coast girl, but the Sunset before sunrise is lovely in a way that Gotham could never be.

 They don't talk, at first. But Artemis knows that silence itches on Dick like a wool sweater. He talks just for something to do. She used to wonder sometimes how Batman got Dick to keep his mouth shut for more than five minutes when they were doing the whole Dynamic Duo, creatures of the night thing.

 Some things haven't changed. Ten minutes into their walk, Dick clears his throat.

 “So,” he says, and Artemis can _hear_ the effort he's making at keeping his voice light. “I heard from Roy a while back. Seems like he's, uh, doing okay.”

 “He's still banging my sister, if that's what you mean,” Artemis replies. Dick makes a noise that's somewhere between laughing and choking.

 “For real, though,” Artemis continues, “he's doing okay. Got his 6 month chip a little while ago. He's doing a pretty good job at being a dad, though if you tell him I said that I'll kill you. And Lian's perfect, obviously.”

 “You got any pictures?”

 “Duh.” Artemis takes out her phone, unlocks it, and scrolls through her pictures until she finds her favorite. It's from the last time Lian stayed over at her place. Lian is reaching towards the camera, smiling her gummy smile with her eyes squinted shut, something sticky and purple on her fingers. Brucely's big, floppy-eared head is poking up under her little arm. Seconds after Artemis had snapped the picture, Brucely had bowled Lian over, and the little girl had laughed so hard she'd gotten the hiccups.

Dick looks at the picture for a long while with a soft fondness. “Yeah, she's totally perfect,” he says, handing the phone back to her. “And you're _such_ an aunt.”

 “Shut up,” Artemis says, chucking him on the shoulder. He grins at her.

 “You should come meet her,” Artemis says. She didn't really think about it, before she said it, but it feels right. Dick's good with kids, always has been, judging by Robin 3.0. And he should meet Lian. He's one of her dad's oldest friends.

 “Really?” Dick asks, all surprised and tender.

 “Yeah,” Artemis says. “You can distract her while I make lunch. If you walk on your hands she'll be set for, like, forty-five minutes.”

 Dick laughs. “I have a very particular set of skills, but they do come in handy sometimes,” he says.

 “Yeah, just so long as you don't convince her that jumping off buildings is a completely normal thing to do. She already gets enough of that vigilante shit from her parents.”

 “So Roy's back in the game?”

 “Yeah, Roy _and_ Jade. It's weird. They do this fighting-as-foreplay thing that's a little disturbing.”

 Dick laughs again, gives her a sly look. “Come on, Artie. We've _both_ been known to partake in a little fighting-as-foreplay.” Artemis snorts and flips him off.

 “So, you wanna hear the rest of the hot goss?” she asks. Dick nods, and Artemis launches into the saga of M'gann and Conner, Round 2.

 They reach the top of Grand View Park just as Artemis concludes her heavily dramatized account of Bart and Jaime's first kiss. She sits down heavily in her favorite spot, under a sprawling, fragrant tree just over the crest of the hill. Dick's a little winded from trying to climb a long, steep hill while laughing. He's still giggly as he sits down next to her.

 From here they can see the city spread out before them like a pale carpet. The hills are wreathed in fog still, the occasional roof poking through the grey. The bay is a streak of silvery dark on the horizon, dark masses of land rising behind it.

 “Happy birthday, by the way,” Artemis says, bumping her shoulder against Dick's. He looks at her, bemused.

 “Oh yeah, thanks,” he says. “I had kind of forgotten.”

 “Moron,” she says fondly.

 “It's sweet that you remembered, though,” Dick says.

 “C'mon, I could never forget your birthday. The image of Bette Kane walk of shame-ing it out of your apartment was so traumatizing it's forever burned in my memory.”

 Dick chuckles, shaking his head. “You know, she didn't even recognize me? I was a little hurt, to be honest. I thought I was more memorable.”

 “Yeah, well, you were kind of a dweeb in high school.”

 “I was not! I was very well-liked.”

 “You were a mathlete, Grayson.”

 It feels nice to joke around like this, to rib on each other and talk without kid gloves on. Then the full weight of the memory of Dick's last birthday hits her.

 She remembers Wally waking her up with a kiss. His breath smelled like coffee and Red Bull, which was objectively gross, but for some reason she didn't mind.

 “You're up already?” she said muzzily, swinging her feet onto the floor.

 “Didn't sleep,” he answered, already back in the kitchen. “Babe, can you make another pot of coffee?”

 “Why can't you? You're already in the kitchen,” she said as she started getting ready for her daily early-morning run.

 “Yeah, but you're way better at it.”

 “That is _definitely_ a made up excuse. If you can work an autoclave you can work a Mister Coffee.”

 Wally laughed at her, said something about how she never lets him get away with anything. She heard the whir of the coffee grinder as she was brushing her teeth.

 She kissed him on the back of the neck when she came into the kitchen, and he handed her a cup of dark, sweet coffee, made the way she liked it. Then they sat down to video chat with Dick for his birthday. He looked like a cat that had just caught a canary, and still had some red lipstick on his jaw.

 “Man, when did little Dickie turn into such sexpot?” Wally asked after Dick cut their chat short. Artemis chuckled.

 “Who knows. We must've missed it.”

 She and Wally kissed again before she left, quick and sweet. When she came back an hour later to grab her backpack before class, he was asleep on the desk, drooling on his sleeve. It was stupidly adorable.

 From the way he's staring into the middle distance and worrying his lip, Dick is remembering his last birthday, too. Up here, in the calm, it's impossible to pretend that everything's normal, that nothing happened. Artemis takes a deep breath, like she's steeling herself for a jump into icy water.

 “I think...I think we have to talk about it now,” she says.

 “Yeah,” Dick says. Artemis can see his jaw working under his skin, like he's forming his words inside his mouth before he says them. “Artemis, I know this doesn't mean anything, but I'm really sorry. I am. I know what I did was selfish. It was wrong to leave you alone, to leave the team alone, but I just...” Dick stops, swallows. “Are you...are you doing okay?

 Artemis doesn't know how to answer that. “It's hard,” she says, finally. “Being with the team, doing the work, it helps, but...the hurt sneaks up on me, sometimes. I'm just doing some normal thing, like washing my hair or feeding the dog or whatever, and then it hits me like a fucking mack truck that he's gone. And I want to just blow up my whole life. But I don't.”

 Artemis is looking at her fingers, pale against the damp grass. She can't see Dick's face, but she doesn't need to. She's known him long enough to recognize the way his breath comes out in hot little puffs when he's trying not to cry.

 “Why'd you leave?” Artemis asks for the second time that day. Dick's breath hitches, a sharp inhale, like he's in pain.

 “I was _jealous_ , Artemis,” he says, brokenly. “I was jealous because he died loving you and hating me, and he was my best friend and I _loved_ him and it hurt too much so I left.” He's crying in earnest now, his shoulders trembling. “I'm sorry. It just hurt too much. I know it's horrible, and I can never--”

 “Dick,” Artemis says. She takes his face in her hand, turns it towards her. Holds his terrified gaze with her own. Tears slide over her fingers. “I understand,” Artemis says.And she does.

 They don't speak for a while. The city is quiet, except for the occasional far-off scream of a siren. It's strange, surreal, but kind of lovely, too. The park feels like a safe, secret place. Somehow they end up holding hands. Artemis can't remember who started it, but it feels safe and secret, too, like something from childhood.

 “You wanna hear something terrible?” Artemis whispers. Dick squeezes her hand. “I don't regret going under cover. Everyone keeps kind of assuming that I do, but I don't. It's like, of course I wanted more time with him. But it was driving me crazy, being out of the game. If I had turned you down, we would have just spent three months fighting. So it was kind of better, to leave and come back to something good. Y'know?”

 “Yeah,” Dick says. His voice is raw. “That's not terrible, that's understandable. And...I'm glad. That I didn't make things worse.”

 Artemis leans her head against him. It seems like it makes him feel better.

 “How about you?” she asks softly. “Are you okay?”

 “I don't know, Artie,” he replies, just as softly. “I wasn't, for a long time. But maybe I will be, some day.”

 Artemis hums against his shoulder. Dick presses his lips against her hair, chaste and gentle, like a brother.

 “What do you think you're gonna do now?” Artemis asks when Dick's breathing has evened out.

 “Well, I'm going to meet Lian, if that's still okay.” Artemis nods. “After that, I don't know. Get in touch with people, maybe.” His chest moves underneath her cheek as he sighs. “I don't think I'm ready to get back in the game, though. Not yet.”

 “I think everyone will understand.”

 “Yeah, I hope so.” Dick sounds all sad and distant again. Artemis tightens her hold on his hand, nudges his shoulder. _It's okay. I'm here. I understood_.

 “Maybe I'll go to college,” Dick says after a while. “What was it like?” Like college is some crazy, alien thing. Maybe to him it is.

 “It was good. It felt...normal. And that was nice, for a while.”

 “Did you know I'm the only graduate of Gotham Academy in thirty years to not matriculate to a four year university? I did. Cuz the school told me that. Repeatedly.” Artemis chuckles.

 “Delinquent,” she says. “So, if you went to college, what would you study?”

 “Not sure. Maybe computer science, like Babs. Or criminology or psychology. Or maybe something totally different, like, I dunno, comparative literature.”

 “Different might be good,” Artemis says. “For a while, at least.”

 “Yeah. For a while.”

 His fingers move around hers, his thumb rubbing little circles into her skin. She feels the thanks—he doesn't have to say it.

 The sky is brightening, the horizon streaked with fuzzy pink. The street lights below them wink out in little waves. Somewhere close, a car starts, and a dog begins to bark. They stay like that, steepled together, for a long time, watching the city below them wake up.

 

 

 


End file.
